"I'm not fine-dining," Carrier says. "I'm casual. I'm funky. I want my restaurants to reflect that. I don't want this place to be a special-occasion place. I want it to be a place where people can hang out, listen to live music, have a couple of drinks, and order a few small items from the menu without busting their wallets."

In true Carrier fashion, Cielo has been turned upside-down and inside-out, stripped, painted, and wallpapered to re-emerge as the Molly Fontaine Lounge, scheduled to open in about two weeks.

Molly Fontaine Lounge
"I've been going to estate sales for seven months. I have looked at books of European lounges from all eras over and over again, and I have this picture in my head of social clubs in New York City years ago," Carrier says, describing the concept for the lounge.

"To me, making this home into a lounge is like taking it back," Carrier says. She's referring to the mood set a few decades back by a previous owner, a notorious ladies' man, and his friends. "It was a big party house with a different woman on every floor," she says.

The building that houses the soon-to-be lounge was built in 1886 as a wedding present for Molly Woodruff Fontaine and is one of the few homes of its type in Victorian Village that didn't get torn down during the 1960s. Carrier's late husband Bob bought the house in 1985.

Initially, the house was both home to the couple and an outlet for Carrier's newly established catering business, Another Roadside Attraction. A few years later, with a $35,000 loan from her dad, Carrier renovated the home's carriage house and moved her catering business there. Eventually, the couple started to look for a place that was better suited for a growing family. In fact, Carrier even tried to sell the main house.

"I knew I wanted to keep Roadside where it was, but nobody wanted to buy just the main house, so I decided to turn it into a restaurant," Carrier says. She started the rezoning process in 1994 and opened Cielo two years later.

More than 10 years have passed since opening day, and Carrier says it is time for a change.

"We are still going to be very accessible for everybody," she explains. "We can still accommodate private parties, because we can mold the space according to the event. One of my guys from the Beauty Shop custom-made the bars and put them on casters so they can be rearranged or moved out of the way if needed."